Friday, March 18, 2016

Mulcair's Future Appears Dim

It's the year for renewal and, with any luck, that will include the New Democratic Party. Support for leader Tom Mulcair is flagging as the party convention nears.

Support for Thomas Mulcair appears tepid as the NDP leader heads toward a difficult vote on his leadership next month, according to a new Forum Research poll.

The March 15 poll found that 35 per cent of those surveyed approve of Mulcair’s job as NDP leader, essentially unchanged from a month before. But his support among the small group of NDP partisans interviewed by Forum fell to 67 per cent, down from 74 per cent in February.

Perhaps more troubling for the party, however, is that 36 per cent of self-identified NDP voters told Forum they’d vote Liberal if an election were held tomorrow.

“Like in the federal election, the Liberals are eating the NDP’s lunch. That’s a big defection rate,” Lorne Bozinoff, the president of Forum Research Inc., said in an interview Thursday.

What an awkward reversal of fortunes for a party that spent the better part of a decade trying to put paid to the Liberals only to find itself resoundingly consigned back to the political basement.

Your first problem, Anon, is that I don't support the Liberals. I have written about the good things the Trudeau administration has done but plenty of scathing critiques of their very serious failings.

The fact is you've got a lousy leader, worse than the guy he succeeded. You abandoned the Left, you abandoned organized labour and you abandoned the fight against inequality. You earned your way back into the basement of Parliamentary politics in Canada.

Mulcair is an anchor around your necks. If you want to keep him you might even get a 'thank you' card from Trudeau.

The only consistency is a hatred of all things NDP, for the same reason back then as now: the NDP steals votes the Liberals feel entitled to.

That, by the way, defines what it means to be Liberal: entitlement to empty power. That and accepting bribes in exchange for designer legislation. That and doing the dirty work the Cons can't get away with. That and their governments consistently imploding in corruption.

Notice Junior is even right of Hillary Clinton who is opposed to the TPP, which Trudeau claims will be creator of middle class jobs? Who would've ever thought the Canadian Liberal party would move right of the US Democratic party? That's Liberal 'renewal' for ya! (Progressive Liberal is an obvious oxymoron. My God, talk about "breathtakingly stupid willful blindness"!!)

Anon, I don't think using somewhat narrow issues like the TPP to sort politicians into Left-Right camps is very helpful. Interestingly, Patrick Brown (Ontario PC party leader, ex-federal Conservative MP) is in favour of Carbon Taxes. Would you say, then, that Tom is surely to the right of Patrick Brown?

Madness is taking a whole bunch of single issues of relatively minor import and expecting a politician to toe the line on each in order to demonstrate true fealty to the party. Just look at the US Republican party: every single Republican office holder can (and often is) denounced as a RHINO by the self-appointed true party faithful.

The TPP to my mind isn't a big, big issue. Whether you support or oppose it, don't make it out to be more than it is, or use it as some kind of party-loyalty test. If the TPP goes ahead as is, it's possible for some of its bad effects on the economy to be mitigated. From the time of NAFTA until recently, the neo-liberal consensus was that economic dislocation from trade wouldn't need to be explicitly dealt with. A lot of economists, still generally favourable to free trade, now recognize that this is a mistaken view.

We should learn from experience. The NDP may well oppose the TPP: but if it comes into effect, it ought to try to see its deleterious effects properly dealt with, and not just throw up its hands and sigh heavily.

*His is the party of labour: yet he opposed federal stimulus in a lackluster economy. Because the federal government is the largest actor in the economy, the leverage of fiscal policy can affect employment, jobs and prosperity.

*His is a federalist party: yet he takes this 50%+1 notion as a mandate for Quebec sovereignty. This is seriously concerning, since cracking up Canada isn't a minor policy, or reversible.

During the 2015 campaign, the NDP and Green parties ran on federal carbon pricing. Trudeau ran opposed to get the Red Tory vote and support the right-wing vision that Canada is a dirty-energy super-power.

It would be absurd to suggest that the cap-and-trade system is not carbon pricing.

Also neoliberals like Preston Manning and Christopher Ragan support revenue-neutral carbon taxation. Raise consumption taxes. Cut "harmful" income taxes. Their EcoFiscal commission actually brags that BC has cut corporate taxes by more than $700M than it raised in carbon taxes.

Neoliberal green is just another looting scheme. The only way to tackle the issue is to subsidize green energy with progressive taxation to make it cheaper than dirty energy, which we shouldn't be using at all. Carbon taxation will do little. The price of oil tripled from 2003 to 2008. Yet it did nothing to curb consumption.

@ NPov - yes, the NDP once did an invaluable service to the country and all Canadians by acting as the "conscience of Parliament." It wasn't necessary that they form government. At times of minority government they sometimes held the balance of power and could use that to advance a progressive agenda.

It's amazing the denialism and bitterness that has now become the bread and butter of so many Dippers. This post is about Mulcair's failings, piggybacked on Layton's failings, and their collective abandonment of the Left in a blatant dash for power that failed. Yet these comments instead focus on Trudeau, the guy who reversed his fortunes and theirs, and who still, according to the referenced survey, enjoys the support of a significant portion of self-identified NDP voters. That, and the realization of their very own 'lost decade' must be bitter medicine to swallow.